Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center

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Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center
The 5 MWe reactor, showing the fuel channels
Chosŏn'gŭl:	녕변핵시설
Hanja:	寧邊核施設
McCune-Reischauer:	Nyŏngbyŏn haeksisŏl
Revised Romanization:	Nyeongbyeon haeksiseol

The Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center^[1] is North Korea's major nuclear facility, operating its first nuclear reactors. It is located in the county of Yongbyon in North Pyongan province, 100 km north of Pyongyang.

The major installations include all aspects of a Magnox nuclear reactor fuel cycle:

a fuel fabrication plant,
a 5 MWe experimental reactor producing power and district heating,
a short-term spent fuel storage facility,
a fuel reprocessing facility that extracts plutonium using the PUREX process.

Magnox spent fuel is not designed for long-term storage as both the casing and uranium metal core react with water, it is designed to be reprocessed within a few years of removal from a reactor. As a carbon dioxide cooled, graphite moderated Magnox reactor does not require difficult to produce enriched uranium fuel or heavy water moderator it is an attractive choice for a wholly indigenous nuclear reactor development.

Construction of the 5 MWe experimental reactor began in 1980, and the reactor first went critical in August 1985. It operated intermittently until 1994 when it was shut down in accord with the U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework. Following the breakdown of the Agreed Framework in 2002, operation restarted in February 2003, creating plutonium within its fuel load at a rate of about 5 kg per year. The reactor fuel was replaced between April and June 2005. The spent nuclear fuel has been reprocessing with an estimated yield of about 45 kg of plutonium metal, some of which was used for the nuclear weapon involved in the 2006 North Korean nuclear test. [1]

Yongbyon is also the site of a 50 MWe Magnox prototype power reactor, but construction was halted in 1994 about a year from completion in accord with the Agreed Framework, and by 2004 the structures and pipework had deteriorated badly.

Another 200 MWe Magnox fullscale power reactor was being constructed at Taechon, 20 km north-west of Yongbyon, until construction was also halted in 1994 in accord with the Agreed Framework.

The center also has an IRT-2M pool-type research reactor, supplied by the Soviet Union in 1963, operational since 1965. [2] As the center has not received fresh fuel since Soviet times, this reactor is now only run occassionly to produce Iodine-131 for thyroid cancer radiation therapy.